Fenway Park configured for outdoor hockey. Note how the seats face toward the rink and NOT toward home plate.
Now that the Boston Red Sox have rid themselves of the
toxins that polluted the team for several years and turned off so many fans
that the team’s sellout streak is “officially” over–it actually ended in
mid-2012–the Red Sox are in full makeover mode. So why not go the whole way and
finally rid themselves of Fenway Park?
I realize some will claim my remark is more heretical than asserting that the pope is a gay Rastafarian, but hear me out. I went to Fenway
Park most recently on April 14, where I missed a heck of a good game: Clay
Buchholz tossed a near no-hitter against Tampa. Alas, though my attention was
rapt, my seats were near the right-field foul post. The “foulest” thing about
them is that the Red Sox sold this $52 perch as “field box.” I suppose that’s
technically correct as my sight was of–left field! Seriously. Seeing home plate entailed turning either my neck of my entire body 90 degrees to the
left. I’ll simply say that those two exercises in yogic contortion were easier
three decades ago than they are now.
One hears so much that Fenway Park is a “jewel” and that one
can “get so close to the action.” That’s certainly true–for a handful of seats
that cost a king’s ransom and in which most visitors to Fenway will never plant
their butts unless they know someone in Boston politics, city-based
corporations, or organized crime. (But I repeat myself.) Fenway Park’s
reputation rests almost entirely on how well roughly 5,000 people get to see a
given game, about 18% of the stadium’s capacity. But let me be charitable.
Let’s pretend–and it’s a stretch–that a third of the seats are “good.” That
means that on a given night just 13,000 people actually witness the game for
which they’ve paid a lot of money to see, and 26,000 must crane, strain, and
pain themselves for glimpses of it. Thousands miss just about everything
because they are planted behind pillars or beneath the upper deck overhang. In
fact, if you’re under the deck, you’ll never see the entire flight of a single
fly ball and, from some angles, you’ll even miss groundballs. Given the
poor experience offered roughly two-thirds of those attending Fenway, it’s
obscene for Boston to occupy its current position as the single-most expensive
venue in Major League Baseball. (A recent study estimates it will cost a family
of four a penny under $337 to see a game at Fenway Park.)
This is simply inexcusable. Fenway has been cruising for
decades on a reputation for being a quaint throwback–like Chicago’s Wrigley
Field (which is vastly superior to Fenway in nearly every respect, though it
too has “issues”). Let’s be frank: Fenway Park and Wrigley Field were state of
the art ballparks for their time, but that time was the 1910s through the
1940s. They were among the first steel, concrete, and brick ballparks and they set
the bar for others to follow. (Prior to their ilk, wooden ballparks had a
distressing tendency to rot or burn down, the latter the fate of the Huntington Avenue
Baseball Grounds, where Boston teams competed before Fenway was built.) Lest we
forget, Fenway and Wrigley were also designed to be multipurpose stadiums. Fenway hasn’t
hosted regular football games since 1968, or soccer in over 40 years, but it
used to, which is why so many seats face the outfield grass rather than home
plate. It’s also why Fenway has all those weird angles, which are packaged as
“quirky” because it’s such a nicer word than “bizarre.”
Okay, we’ve had the 100th birthday bash and
millions of folks have had the “experience” of seeing a Fenway game, but what
they’ve seen is a museum, not baseball. I’m sick of hearing Bostonians tell me
what a “great” place Fenway is. My reply is to get out more. I’ve not been to
every park in the country, but now that the one-size-fits-none ovals (Atlanta,
Cincinnati, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington) have
been retired, and the domed nightmares in Minnesota and Houston have closed,
the only MLB venue where I’ve seen a
game that’s worse than Fenway is Tampa’s pathetic Tropicana Stadium. Certainly
Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and San Francisco are vastly superior to
Fenway Park, but I’d ever rate seeing games in Chicago’s Comiskey Park and
Oakland as better. (You’re far from the action but at least you can see it from
any angle.) And I might as well commit the ultimate heresy. If the Red Sox decide to
replicate the Fenway experience in a state-of-the-art facility that retains
vestiges of the past, they could do worse than follow the lead of the Yankees!
The new Yankee Stadium is massive, but it really feels like the old park, minus
the obstructed views, uncomfortable seats, and wrong-way-facing vantage points.
Thomas Paine once remarked, “T’is time to part.” He meant
the connection between Britain and the American colonies, but I think if Tom
had been in the stands next to me on April 14, he would have extended the
remark to Fenway. In the interim, those who wish to spend a fortune and delude
themselves into thinking they are seeing “old-time” baseball are welcome to vie
for seats without competition from me. I’ve spent my last dime in Fenway.
Enough with Green Monster seats, skyboxes, family picnic areas, and other such
faux amenities! I don’t care how many garlands you drape on it, Fenway is a
broken-down plow horse that should be put down and sent to the glue factory.
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